The IT Nerd

Yesterday I wrote about the fact that Yahoo/Oath have changed their terms of service for their e-mail offering, and as a result of that Rogers customers are up in arms because Rogers uses the Yahoo/Oath e-mail platform and people feel that their privacy might be under threat. Overnight, I got 7 or 8 e-mails from users asking me what options exist for users who want to switch from using Rogers e-mail service and still have their privacy.

In my mind, there’s really only one option that balances the need for privacy with ease of use and support for a variety of OSes and devices. That option is ProtonMail. Based in Switzerland, these guys are free (Though they do have a paid option. More on that in a moment) and use open source software to provide their services. They guarantee that nobody can see your e-mails. And they do mean nobody. Not your ISP. Not a national government. Not even them. In fact, if you forget your password, you lose your e-mail if you don’t have a recovery account set up. You don’t get more secure than that. Another plus is that these guys don’t store IP address info. Because when you send an e-mail, the external IP address of the network you sent it from is usually logged. That can allow someone to track you down in theory. That can’t happen with these guys.

The free version of ProtonMail supports 500 MB of email storage and limits your usage to 150 messages per day. You can pay for the Plus or Visionary service for more space, e-mail aliases, priority support, labels, custom filtering options, auto-reply, built-in VPN protection, and the ability to send more e-mails each day. There’s also a Business plan available. So you do have options depending on your e-mail needs. But I suspect that most Rogers users would be fine with the free option.

Are there any downsides to using ProtonMail? The only one that I can see is that it does not support IMAP, SMTP, or POP3 protocols. Likely to ensure your security. Thus you’re stuck using their web interface or their iOS or Android app. But they are all easy to use so I don’t think that’s too much of a hardship.

Thus if you’re a user of Rogers e-mail, and you’re not thrilled with the change to the terms of service from Yahoo/Oath because of the privacy implications related to that, you might want to check out ProtonMail as you get privacy and security for your e-mail with them.

This entry was posted on April 24, 2018 at 11:33 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Rogers, Yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.